Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality

Book excerpt: Without question, modernist texts have been haunted by what can be known, or more aptly, what cannot be known. This position is foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism. Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real material changes pertaining to the status of women. Thus, as many others have adeptly argued, modernism is also a crisis in gender. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality keenly suggests that these narratives - the thinking of what constitutes truth and the rethinking of gender - are intertwined. Interpreting Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Victory, Forster's A Passage to India and Maurice, Lawrence's Women in Love, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse through Luce Irigaray's rereading of western metaphysics, Raschke suggests that where there is a crisis in knowing, there is also a crisis in gender.